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This week, our eyers were on New Hampshire, where Donald Trump won, again. This was not a surprise. Trump’s poll numbers have been robust for weeks. And over the past few days, he’s been basking in his assumed dominance. The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf has been following Trump around. He tweeted out this picture of Trump with his tongue out, looking incredibly relaxed and sort of silly. It captured the campaign’s current mood.

“It was right after the news broke that DeSantis was dropping out, and he’s walking in the conquering hero,” Arnsdorf said.

This is a real turnaround. It’s tough to remember now, but I’ll do my best to remind you how things looked in late 2022. In the wake of the 2022 midterms—elections in which Trump’s favored candidates lost their races, for the most part—some Republicans seemed eager to move on. Virginia’s lieutenant governor went on Fox Business to say, “The voters have spoken, and they have said that they want a different leader.” Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said, “You can’t have a party that’s built around one person’s personality.” And this was former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan: “I think Trump’s kind of a drag on our ticket. I think Donald Trump gives us problems politically.”

Back then, I would have said that Trump’s legal troubles were going to be a huge problem for his candidacy, but that’s not how it’s worked out in the primary, at least. “It had the effect of pressuring Republicans to come to his defense, of circling the wagons around him,” Arnsdorf said. “Every time he goes into a courtroom, he makes headlines. In 2024, when the candidate is Donald Trump, a court appearance can be a campaign stop that is even more effective at getting their message out than a traditional rally.”

After New Hampshire, Trump’s path to the Republican nomination seems clear, indictments be damned. On a recent episode of What Next, we discussed how one of his greatest liabilities become a campaign superpower. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: A couple days ago, we did a show about the implosion of Ron DeSantis’ campaign. And one of the things that my guest, Ben Mathis-Lilley highlighted was the fact that Donald Trump actually seemed to become the leading Republican nominee just as his legal troubles got serious. I’m wondering if we can go back in time to last spring to lay out how Trump’s campaign and Trump’s legal liability have been knitted together. Trump was first indicted in Manhattan in early April. There weren’t any cameras in the courtroom, but that didn’t mean he didn’t make a show out of it.

Isaac Arnsdorf: You can look at the tracking polls, and there’s a very clear inflection point right around April 1. The indictments obviously had a huge amount to do with that. The campaign used that moment to pressure Republicans to come to Trump’s defense and then very quickly turned those into endorsements. By the end of the month, a lot of Republicans were calling his nomination inevitable.

A really telling moment was DeSantis’ initial reaction to that first indictment—which had to do with the hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election—which was to distance himself or make an underhanded swipe at the underlying tawdry details of that case. And he very quickly got a lot of blowback to that and walked it back, and then reversed himself and talked about how he wasn’t going to participate in extraditing Trump to New York as the governor of Florida. That really captures how, throughout the whole........

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